I love it!
Someone should start a paintball Dueling League.
I would watch that on ESPN8, especially this time of year when the only motor racing out there is snowmobiles and school busses.
As I told Mr Bowman in a message:
The group I belonged to also fought with full intent and real weapons, although the swords were unsharpened. We didn’t wear armor or pads, but we did wear masks when fighting with steel. We didn’t bother when we fought with wooden wasters. We got some bruises and cuts, but that was all part of the fun.
We would swing with full force and intent, but if it was going to make contact with the body we would try to pull the strike at the last second.
These guys are taking it to a new level. And I can tell you... Getting your bell rung my a mace is -no- fun even with a steel helmet on.
Hopefully they are studying the available fechtbuch sources and making a good historical research activity. There’s nothing like good honest contact to test everybody’s theories about how medieval martial arts really worked. The last decade or so has brought out a wealth of new information from these sorts of studies. Much of what we thought we knew about the martial arts of Europe has turned out to be wrong.